Thursday, November 29, 2007

At Nanosolar, we have taken the highest-performance and most durable photovoltaic thin-film semiconductor, called CIGS (for "Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide"), and innovated on all seven critical areas necessary to reach a breakthrough cost reduction in solar cells, panels, and systems.

As opposed to using slow and expensive high-vacuum based thin-film deposition processes, we developed a proprietary ink to allow us to use much simpler and higher-yield printing for depositing the solar cell's semiconductor.

We use a highly conductive yet low-cost foil as a substrate, which allows us to avoid the need to separately deposit an expensive bottom electrode layer (as required for a non-conductive substrate such as glass).

The iconic iPod music player has for many years been challenged by new so-called iPod Killer products entering the market. The Eco Media Player is unlikely to be one of those. But it does add a new dimension to the genre.

The media player bit comes into play as the unit is a video player, music player, fm radio, LED torch, photo viewer, hi-fi recorder, memo recorder, data storage device and a mobile phone charger. The eco prefix is applied because it does all of this without need of replacement batteries. Power comes simply from winding a fold-out handle on the rear of the unit (or, if you want, charging it via USB cable to your computer). 40 minutes of audio play requires one minute of self powering.

An onboard lithium ion battery has a maximum playtime of 20 hours. Audio will play back in mp3, wma, asf, wav, ogg formats (no mention of aac, the iPod default). The 1.8" colour screen shows videos in asv (and wmv, avi, mpeg, after conversion) and photos as jpeg, bmp, gif images. With 2GB of built-in memory the media reader supports SD cards to increase this. Microsoft Windows seems to be the supported operated system when connected to computers with no indication of compatibility with Macs. Sells for £155 in the UK, and $425 in Australia.

If you’re wondering who Trevor Baylis is, he was the British inventor that created the original wind-up radio, as a way of getting information on HIV/AIDS to remote African villagers. The success of that project spawned the brand Freeplay, who have dominated the self powered device market for the past decade.

Trevor looks like he is re-entering that market with this product. Inventors John and Tony Davies approached his ideas incubator company and Trevor so liked what he saw he lent his name to not only the Eco Media Player, but an accompanying line of self-powered eco-products under the moniker of New Generation. There are lanterns, head torches, radios, bicycle lights, etc. Tango in the UK carry the full range.------------

Monday, November 26, 2007

Dubbed the MiniStation TurboUSB [what, no 'super', no 'nano'?, Ed.], it is protected by a tough outer case. The 5400rpm hard drive is powered through a USB 2.0 connection, with the cable wrapping around the device’s outer rim.

The 320GB drive will be available from next month for £155.------------

On Sunday evening, I watched the 154th episode of The West Wing, the finale to the best television series I have ever watched.

Aaron Sorkin, its creator and primary writer for the first four seasons, creates scripts that are intelligent, inventive, challenging and entertaining. The dialogue is sharp, informed and involving, moving you through issues that impact millions of people as it chronicles fictional, but believable days in the life of the White House administration.

The actors are perfectly cast, and they are obviously enjoying living out their characters. And the interaction between them is so dynamic that I often found myself replaying sequences of dialogue in a similar way to which I might re-read a particularly complex, or enjoyable, section of a novel.

Equality between males and females is assumed. Sexuality is acknowledged but not exploited. Individual's strengths are recognised and rewarded, and weaknesses acknowledged but kept in perspective and rarely despised.

In a single episode you can find yourself laughing out loud, marvelling at the complexity of the American political system, wrestling with a massive military dilemma before bursting into floods of tears at a random act of kindness.

As Sorkin moves away from the writing, the mood of the series does change, with a harder and more negative edge becoming evident. But this never degenerates into 'soap-opera', there is always plenty of respect for honourable behaviour and examples of careful handling of 'real-world' dichotomies and decisions.

If you're thinking of a 'watching project' for next year, why not treat yourself to Series 1 on DVD (available from amazon.co.uk for under £18.00 including delivery). Or if you're feeling rich, the complete DVD box set for £121. That's 154 episodes (112 hours of viewing), on over 44 discs. That's less than a £1 per episode. And you get a bucketful of other stuff thrown in, if you're interested in 'extras'.

If you rationed yourself to 3 episodes a week beginning 1 January that would keep you going through 2008 - although my guess is that you'll have watched the last episode before June is out!------------

Thursday, November 22, 2007

The Nokia N810 has a large colour display, touchpad screen, slide-out keyboard, 400 MHz processor and up to 10GB of memory (an optional 8GB memory card combined with 2GB internal memory). To access the Internet, users simply connect via the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot or over Bluetooth on a mobile phone.

The Nokia N810 also features GPS, with free maps preloaded for users to browse detailed locations, search for street addresses, find points of interest (POI) as well as nearby Wi-Fi hotspots.

The maemo Linux-based OS2008 features a highly customizable user interface and a Mozilla based browser with Ajax and Adobe flash 9.------------

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

"For me, it started one Saturday morning in 2002. On a whim I picked up two Dondero A Capella Choir cassettes at a thrift store, something to listen to in the car as I went about my errands.

"I got in the car, popped in a tape and "Black Water" started to play. As with so many ubiquitous pop songs, the Doobie Brothers' original never did much for me. It was just another pretty sound that might come over the loudspeakers at the supermarket. The Dondero version, however, pulled the song out of the background and shoved it right in front of me. Now I had context: knowing that high school students learned this song, rehearsed this song, performed it in front of family and friends finally made "Black Water" real to me as a piece of music.

"This ability to make tired old pop songs fresh is only part of what makes these concerts a such a pleasure to hear, however. There's real skill demonstrated here, and a palpable sense of excitement in this music. The students sound like they're having a great time on stage, and the audience is cheering and shouting with equal - if not more - enthusiasm."

---------

Visit the link for a chance to listen to, or download, the 'greatest hits' compilation. Or download one of the annual concerts complete with intros and outros.

Relax into the shaky timings and dodgy notes. Think Polyphonic Spree meets The Go! Team. Immerse yourself in the moment and find yourself smiling out loud at the enthusiasm and joy that these people are experiencing in playing, singing (and listening to) some of their favourite songs.------------

Monday, November 19, 2007

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos believes the Kindle will be to reading what the iPod was to music, according to a report published on the online edition of magazine.

In what appears to be the Bezos' first interview about the company's upcoming electronic reader, Amazon's chief told the magazine that the Kindle can store up to 200 books and connect to the Web with the help of a system called Whispernet. Amazon, a company that has become synonymous with buying books online, will also offer Kindle owners a selection of more than 88,000 digital books at launch time, according to Newsweek.

Last week, CNET News.com reported that Bezos will unveil the Kindle at a media event in New York on Monday. An industry source said that the device will retail for $399 and receive automatic downloads from major newspapers, magazines and other publications. The source also said that Kindle features e-mail.

The e-mail service enables owners to receive word documents or PDF files that can be stored in the device's library just like a book, Newsweek reported. But what makes the handheld truly unique is that it downloads books off the Web - and it can do that "in less than a minute," Bezos told the magazine.

E-readers used to confine e-book buyers to wherever their computers were located. Digital books had to be first downloaded to a PC and then synced to an e-reader. Amazon is freeing them to buy wherever they can connect to the Web and this could lead to more impulse purchases.

------------

Amazon have now officially launched it, visit this page for more details, including a video ad/demo------------

Stephen Fry's excellent blog is always worth a read, but his latest (long) article is particularly enlightening. Here are some excerpts:

I expect all of you have heard of the risks posed by the various forms of attack code that go under names like virus, Trojan horse, worm, malware and so on. These are little bits of clandestine code that your computer picks up, usually through email attachments, designed to infect the host (your PC), raid its address books, send out copies of themselves to all your friends and contacts and then either spitefully screw with your operating system, rendering it inoperative or, more likely these days, record your keyboard input and send back to the malicious code’s originator a log of such keystrokes which can be used to determine your passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive data.

But, and here I come to my nightmare scenario, imagine malicious code written by cunning, ruthless criminals that could turn your computer into a kind of slave machine, a zombie PC which can connect with other zombie PCs to create a whole network of robot computers which would grow almost exponentially in power and bandwidth. Such a robot network, or ‘botnet’, would soon overtake all the supercomputers on earth in might and reach.

Let us further imagine that this botnet learned to defend itself against the security forces by moving the location of its command and control centres so fast and so randomly that the head could never be cut off. Let us even further imagine that the criminal masterminds in charge of this colossal entity divided it up into sections which could be sold, leased or rented to other criminals (along with instructions for use) who could use it for spamming, share scamming, phishing, identity theft, fraud, DDoS and any other kind of lucrative enterprise they chose.

The fiendish nature of the code would mean infected PCs wouldn’t freeze or slow down noticeably, so individual computer users like you and me would have no idea that we were enslaved players in this vast criminal conspiracy, the transmission routes would change literally daily from porn sites to cheerful links or witty birthday cards and friendly pointers to interesting blog pages – anything. Those profiting would be almost impossible to catch and the entity itself, the botnet, would grow and refine itself until it became the very stuff of science fiction: the neural nets of William Gibson, Skynet in The Terminator films, the Borg collective in Star Trek, you know the genre.

Well, my (not very surprising) kick in the teeth is this. Such botnets exist and one of them, the Storm botnet, has grown so fast, so terrifyingly and so cunningly, that in the last eight months it has overtaken all the others. Storm is an amalgam of millions (no one knows quite how many) of slave PCs.

It sends out billions of spam messages, stock market scam mails and appears to be behind many examples of what are known as Distributed Denial of Service attacks, which for reasons of malice, politics or criminal extortion close down or threaten to close down legitimate servers by flooding them with more data traffic than they can handle. Using sci-fi sounding techniques like Fast Flux, Storm evades capture and surveillance and recent evidence leads those who know about these things to conclude that parts of it have indeed been leased or sold as ‘botkits’ to less technically savvy criminals.

Storm began life early this year, but as of a couple of weeks ago it had grown into easily the biggest and most sophisticated botnet the world has seen.

But according to The Honeynet Project, Dark Reading and other reliable sites that monitor this subject, Storm is only the beginning. In a year’s time it will in all likelihood seem naïve, clumsy and harmless. Slashdot carried this headline only the other day: “There’s a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow the notorious Storm away in size and sophistication.”

So... Don’t trust those you don’t know. Don’t click on that alluring headline, that tempting YouTube link, that interesting ad, that funny sounding birthday card or joke unless you are one hundred percent certain of its origin.------------

Friday, November 16, 2007

Asus' new micro-laptop runs on Linux, has Wi-Fi and 4GB of flash storage, of which around 2.9GB is consumed by the OS, bundled apps and sample files.

An advantage to using Linux is that it's easier to make the OS fit the screen. The 701's 7in, 100dpi, LED-backlit, 800 x 480 screen isn't a standard resolution, but there are pixels aplenty to ensure dialogue boxes don't disappear off the bottom of the screen as they almost always did with early Windows-based UMPCs. Any that do can usually be resized to fit the screen with just a click. Windows, rather than dialogue boxes, open full-screen by default, but it's easy to switch between them using the tabs in the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

Typing on the 701 is certainly possible, but if your fingers aren't those of a five-year-old, it'll take a bit of practice to make sure you hit the letter you want and not the adjacent keys as well. But all the keys you'd get on a full-sized model are present.

If the keyboard's hard to use, that goes double for the touchpad. A mere 45 x 30mm, it's got a scroll space over on the right-hand side, but that just makes it ever fiddlier to use.

The 701 has three USB ports, a VGA port and SD/SDHC card slot. The other side is home to 3.5mm headphone and microphone sockets and a 10/100Mb Ethernet port.

Closed, the 701 measures 225 x 165 x 25-35mm, but in real terms that means it's the size of a typical hardback novel. It weighs about the same, 890g. In other words, eminently portable, and a perfect size to close up and stash away in your backpack or briefcase when you've finished surfing, writing the latest chapter of your magnum opus or whatever.

At just £220 [camera, model and straw mat not included, Ed.], the Asus Eee PC is a steal. This is a fun, cheap machine.

------------

Editor's postscript: Someone has managed to install Mac OSX on one of these. Bet he doesn't have much room for his iTunes collection.------------

Nokia have announced the N82, featuring a 5 megapixel camera with Xenon flash, autofocus, and a Carl Zeiss lens. It is also capable of recording video at VGA resolution, at 30 frames per second.

The handset has quad-band GSM and WCDMA (2100MHz) support. Data connectivity options include HSDPA and WiFi.

The N82 sports a GPS receiver in addition to Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP support for stereo headsets. The 3.5mm audio jack accommodates standard headphones and can be used with a TV-out cable for displaying videos and photos on a television.

The Nokia N82 measures 112 x 50 x 17mm and weighs 114g. There is a microSD memory card slot with support for capacities up to 8GB. The display is a 2.4" 16 million color TFT screen, with 240 x 320 pixel resolution.

A second front-facing VGA camera is included for video calls. The Nokia N82 costs around £300.------------

Thursday, November 15, 2007

As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. For you, we've created Drobo, the first fully-automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe.

Drobo guards everything on it.Drobo combines up to four hard drives into a big pool of protected storage. Start with two, grow to four, then upsize smaller drives-get Terabytes of protection.

Drobo manages storage, so you don't have to.Just connect Drobo to your Mac or PC. No RAID levels. No management or configuration. Drobo does everything for you. Get rid of multiple external drives. Avoid the complexity of RAID. Attach a Drobo storage robot to your system and let it manage your storage so you don't have to.

Drobo upgrades capacity on-the-fly.Add drives to Drobo at any time. Mix 'n match capacities, brands or speeds. No downtime, data migration, or waiting to access new capacity. Drobo works the way you do.

Drobo lets you "pay as you grow"Hard drives get bigger and cheaper all the time. Don't buy storage capacity until you need it.------------

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

A new era began Tuesday when the Kansas City School District launched the largest distribution of laptops in the metro area.

The school board earlier this year agreed to purchase Apple MacBooks for all of its 5,000 high school students to use at school and at home.

The project aims to better prepare students for college. Principals have lamented for years about their students not having computers at home, fearing they will be behind their peers by the time they get to college.

“Laptop computers will help us to teach each student at their instructional level, so that they can find success,” said Susan Engelmann, a district administrator who oversees the high schools.

The school district required parents and students to attend an orientation session about the rules and expectations for using the laptops.

The school district paid about $6.4 million for the lease. Parents are responsible for the $25 insurance fee. For those unable to pay, the district allows community service as a substitute payment.

The laptops are equipped with software to prevent students from viewing pornography, but parents are also expected to help keep track of Internet usage.

District officials have taken several measures to prevent theft. All of the laptops have stickers clearly identifying them as the property of the Kansas City, Kan., public schools. The sticker will not come off without virtually destroying the laptop.

If thieves find a way around that obstacle, a GPS tracking device will help locate it. If all else fails, district officials said, they could also use a remote device to destroy the hard drive.------------

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

As Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown is seeking to set the agenda by choosing a 'Motto for Britain', chosen by a "citizens' summit" of 1,000 people, allowing it to be "truly representative" of Britishness rather than have it imposed by ministers or a team of highly-paid consultants.

Members of the public will be asked to come up with five or six-word slogans, perhaps based around ideas of fair play or national pride.

Sources described the plan as a "once in a lifetime chance" to capture Britishness in a few words.

Times Online readers have responded with a few of their own, including...

"Great people, great country, Great Britain"

"Courage, reason, humanity, democracy, monarchy"

Some are wary of any sign of nationalism, warning:

"Pride comes before a fall".

And others have grabbed the chance to have a dig at Brown:

"Taxation without Representation is Tyranny"

"Created by heroes, destroyed by Labour"

"Our government no longer listens".

Nostalgia for the empire also runs deep, with suggestions such as:

"Wallowing in a post-colonial miasma"

"Once mighty empire, slightly used".

But most contributors seem to favour engaging in the popular national sport of self deprecation.

"a vocabulary-testing multiple-choice website. Click on the answer that best defines the word. If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word. For each word you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program."

And it would appear it isn't a scam. However as LanceWiggs reports: [edited]

There have been 1.2 billion grains given out so far. That’s 120m correct answers - call it 130m page views.

At a CPM ($ per 1000 impressions) of, say, $20, that’s $2.6 million in income. At a CPM of 10 that’s $1.3m. They feel like a good range, but really I’m just guessing here. I’m confident that the revenue is at least $1m.

Rice is light: 1000 grains is about 26 grams, so 10 grains is about 0.26 grams.

Rice is cheap: 1 bagged metric tonne is $350. So 1.2 billion rice grains is about 3,120 tonnes, or $1.09m FOB. Therefore the site owners are making everything above a CPM of about $8.

Advertisers - if you are paying more than that, then you are enriching one John Breen, who is a very smart cookie who just happens to have also collected $1m for global poverty efforts.

I love this, and I love the moral dilemma aspect as well. Is it right to enrich John Breen while you are enriching poor children?

My answer is yes - as the $1m worth of rice is $1m more rice than the UN had before, and you’ve had some enjoyment along the way. Your opinion may differ, and perhaps John Breen is a non-profit, and the funds channeled to worthy causes or business building?

Thanks to photogabble for the original link to the free rice site.------------

Monday, November 12, 2007

A computer program that emulates the human brain falls for the same optical illusions humans do. It suggests the illusions are a by-product of the way babies learn to filter their complex surroundings. Researchers say this means future robots must be susceptible to the same tricks as humans are in order to see as well as us.

For some time, scientists have believed one class of optical illusions result from the way the brain tries to disentangle the colour of an object and the way it is lit. An object may appear brighter or darker, either because of the shade of its colour, or because it is in bright light or shadows.

The brain learns how to tackle this through trial and error when we are babies, the theory goes. Mostly it gets it right, but occasionally a scene contradicts our previous experiences. The brain gets it wrong and we perceive an object lighter or darker than it really is – creating an illusion.

Until now there has been no way of knowing whether this theory is correct. Beau Lotto and David Corney at University College London, UK, think they have finally done it. They created a program that learns to predict the lightness of an image based on its past experiences – just like a baby. And just like a human, it falls prey to optical illusions.

They trained it using 10,000 greyscale images of fallen leaves that animals might face in nature. It had to predict the true shade of the centre pixel of the images, and change its technique depending on whether its answer was right or wrong.

The researchers then tested the program on lightness illusions that would fool humans. First, it was shown images of a light object on a darker background, and vice versa. Just like humans, the software predicted the objects to be respectively lighter and darker than they really were. It also exhibited more subtle similarities – overestimating lighter shades more than darker shades.

Next, the researchers tried White's Illusion. Again like a human, the program saw areas of grey as darker when placed on a black stripe, and lighter when placed on a white stripe.

Previous computer models tried to directly copy the brain's structure. They could fall for either of the two illusions, but unlike a human, not both at once.

Lotto's programme was instead just designed to judge shades through learning, without being modelled on the brain. He says that suggests our ability to see illusions really is a direct consequence of learning to filter useful information from our environment. "We didn’t evolve to see things accurately, but to see things that would be useful." Lotto points out.

That has implications for robot vision. Most creators of machine vision try to copy human vision because it is so well suited to a variety of environments. The new findings suggest that if we want to exploit its advantages, we also have to suffer its failings. It will be impossible to create a perfect, superhuman robot that never makes mistakes.

Thomas Serre, a vision expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, is impressed with the team's results. "It's a very neat and elegant way of showing that [learning experiences] alone can explain illusions," he says.------------

"I was planning to leave my appraisal of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's Time Machine feature until the end, but necessity has just forced me to look at it in depth straight away. Put simply, if it wasn't for Time Machine, you wouldn't be reading this article.

"Earlier today, I experienced one of about three kernel panics I've encountered since I installed the first Mac OS X Public Beta release back in the later 1990s. I've owned three Macs in that period, and that's the number of kernel panics I've had. But today's did for my MacBook Pro..."

If you own a Mac, the rest of the article makes worthwhile reading.------------

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Since the iPhone's announcement in June, I've been pondering whether I should get one. It looks beautiful. The interface is pure Apple. Intuitive. Clever. Fun. And my first hands-on (with the iPod Touch) reinforced these impressions.

The iPhone is a huge success in the US. And it will continue this success across Europe. For the majority of purchasers it will provide them with a...

in a unit that is only a little larger than a conventional mobile phone, and that is a pleasure to look at and use.

But...

The O2 contracts don't suit my usage. I hardly do any voice calls, and very little texting. There's no 3G. I could purchase a 'hacked' iPhone, but I would be at the mercies of the next Apple 'update' turning my expensive PDA into a 'brick'.

The primary use for my iPod is in my car, where it is mounted on my dashboard. The touchscreen interface is not suited to being used 'on the move', and the track information text is too small to be read at a distance.

The video playback is excellent, but it can't handle Quicktime movie trailers. So, just like with my Nokia E65, I would still have to convert them to a suitable format. Or watch the low-res 'Podcast' versions.

I can hook my E65 up to my PowerBook via Bluetooth and use it as a 3G modem. And it browses my Gmail account (using Google's excellent Symbian app) as well as allowing me to check the latest news via various 'mobile-orientated' sites.

Although using the numeric keypad to type messages is clumsy, I can do it without looking at the screen. And when I want to send an SMS message from work or home I use a program called BluePhoneElite on my PowerBook that allows me to use a proper keyboard.

Oh, and I like the fact I can check the time/calendar on my Nokia without switching the phone on.

The camera quality on the iPhone is acceptable, but no match for my Fuji F30. And when you only get one chance to take a photo, I don't want it to be an image that isn't good enough to enlarge and print some time in the future.

And why, oh why, oh why, didn't Apple implement stereo Bluetooth on the iPhone? And WiFi streaming of music to my Airport Express? A micro-SD slot? I'm guessing for the same reason they didn't put a better camera, 3G, etc on it. So they can sell a load more 'new-improved' iPhones in 2008!

For more on my wishlist for iPod touch v.2, read my previous blog.------------

Revolymer, a spin out company from the University of Bristol, has completed development of its new Clean Gum that can be easily removed from shoes, clothes, pavements and hair. Preliminary results also indicate that the gum will degrade naturally in water.

The company has completed initial trials on pavements in local high streets as part of a collaborative agreement with local councils. In the two trials, leading commercial gums remained stuck to the pavements three out of four times. In all tests the Revolymer gum was removed within 24 hours by natural events.

Professor Terence Cosgrove, of the University of Bristol and Chief Scientific Officer of Revolymer said: “The advantage of our Clean Gum is that it has a great taste, it is easy to remove and has the potential to be environmentally degradable”.

“The basis of our technology is to add an amphiphilic polymer to a modified chewing gum formulation which alters the interfacial properties of the discarded gum cuds, making them less adhesive to most common surfaces.”

The irresponsible discarding of gum cuds costs local councils in the UK £150 million pounds a year to clean up.------------

Forget about Xbox vs. Wii. This Christmas, the fiercest videogame rivalry is a battle of the bands.

The makers of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock pulled out all the stops to defend their turf against rival music game Rock Band. They enlisted actual rock stars to write new riffs, and hired six guitar experts to turn dozens of real-world rock anthems into engaging game fodder.

The first incarnation of Guitar Hero quickly won fans after its 2005 release with its simple concept - play rock songs with a plastic guitar. That game, which turned popular tunes into virtual notes that players slammed out on guitar-shaped controllers, spawned a huge-selling sequel, Guitar Hero II.

But now the franchise faces its first real challenge in the form of Rock Band, a multiplayer game that extends the "let's pretend we're rockers" strategy beyond the guitar to let players tackle drumming and vocals. The fact that Rock Band was created by Harmonix, the original maker of Guitar Hero, makes the struggle all the more personal.

The new song list is packed with well-known hits, from The Killers' "When You Were Young" to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love." The developers also added "boss battles" against virtual versions of real-life guitarists, bringing in Velvet Revolver's Slash and Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello to motion-capture their signature stage moves. Both composed original guitar duets for the battle stages.

In contrast, Rock Band adds drumming and vocals to the mix, creating three distinct single-player experiences - and one crazy four-player mode - but doesn't deepen the guitar experience very much.

Perhaps most importantly, Guitar Hero III will be the only music game on Wii this year. Huang says the Nintendo console's casual game audience makes Wii a "phenomenal platform" for Guitar Hero III.------------

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

A driverless car called Boss has scooped a $2m prize in a Californian race for robotic vehicles.

Boss successfully drove around an urban environment, avoiding other cars, and covering 60 miles (85km) in less than six hours, all without any human control.

The race was organised by the US military's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and is designed to develop unmanned vehicles that could be used in battle situations. Automotive manufacturers say the technology could eventually lead to self-driving cars.

Boss navigated around a simulated town, created on a disused US Air Force base in Victorville, in the Californian desert. It had to deal with single and dual carriageway roads, junctions, buildings and car parks. As well as the 10 other driverless cars, Boss shared the road with more than 30 professional human drivers to simulate busy traffic.

"This is a big day for robotics," said Chris Urmson, the team's technology leader. "We had 11 vehicles that were incredibly capable, and the fact that six of them drove the 60 miles is amazing - just a big day."

Spectators watched from grandstands as the vehicles pulled up at junctions, turned on their indicators, and then pulled away with the steering wheel eerily moving by itself.

One of the key pieces of technology for the winning team was a Lidar - a spinning laser scanner. "It has 64 individual lasers in it, and it spins about 10 times a second to generate about a million measurements of the world," explained Chris Urmson. "That gives us a kind of point cloud which we can use to help understand where features are - cars, walls, the sidewalk and so on."------------

Monday, November 05, 2007

Pervasive broadband is becoming more affordable by the day. I already check my email and browse the web on my Nokia E65 via Vodafone's 3G network. And I can use the E65 as a modem for my PowerBook, via Bluetooth.

Three is now offering internet access packages for your laptop via their cell network. And it would appear that it is available for Macs as well as PCs.

No more wires, no more hassles, no more waiting for a line to be installed. Just plug the USB Modem into your laptop and within five minutes you’re on the web. You can even swap your modem between computers - your broadband wherever you want it.

If you like to take your laptop out to study in the park or work over a latte, you don’t need to search for a hotspot. Mobile Broadband uses 3’s mobile network so you can use your modem wherever you are, and if you’re on 3’s new Turbo network you’ll get broadband speeds of up to 2.8mbps. ------------

Sunday, November 04, 2007

LONDON TO LINCOLNPlanet Earth - Duran DuranMacarena - Los Del RioMagneto And Titanium Man - Paul McCartney & WingsThey Long to Be Close to You (LP Version) - Dionne WarwickSubstitute - CloutDon't Pay The Ferryman - Chris De BurghTerra Firma (Album/Single Version) - The Young Knives(They Long To Be) Close To You - The CranberriesGilt Complex - Sons and DaughtersEvangeline - The Icicle WorksMe & You & a Dog Named Boo - LoboThere She Goes, My Beautiful World - Nick Cave And The Bad SeedsBlue Monday-88 - New Order(They Long to Be) Close to You - Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass(They Long to Be) Close to You - Gwen GuthrieIt's In His Kiss - Linda LewisUs - Regina Spektor(They Long to Be) Close to You - Dusty SpringfieldWhy Do Fools Fall in Love - Alma CoganWorking for the Weekend - LoverboyThey Long To Be Close To You - Burt BacharachStronger - Kanye WestOne More Time - Daft PunkStay With Me - The FacesI'm in the mood for dancing - The Nolans (They Long to Be) Close to You - Barry ManilowCa Plane Pour Moi - Leila KLeave Get Out - Jojo(They Long To Be) Close To You - Michael Ball(They Long To Be) Close To You - Gerald Levert ft. TamiaI like kids - Tommy CooperLast Night - Vitamin C(They Long to Be) Close to You - Petula ClarkTeenage Dirtbag - Wheatusmispronunciation - Ronnie Barker(They Long to Be) Close to You - Ron IsleyPopsicles And Icicles - The MurmaidsDreamboat - Alma CoganIt's Now Or Never - Elvis PresleyPinball Wizard - The Whoship with yoyos - Tommy CooperWhatever You Want - Status QuoThe Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead - XTCCruel To Be Kind - Letter to Cleo

Friday, November 02, 2007

The One Laptop per Child Foundation, founded by MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte, has started offering the lime-green-and-white machines in lots of 10,000 for $200 apiece on its Web site.

The laptops are scheduled to go into production next month at a factory in China, far behind their original schedule and in quantities that are a fraction of Negroponte's earlier projections.

It is unclear when the machines will be ready for customers, as the Web site said version 1.0 of the software that runs the machine will not be ready until December 7.

He hoped to keep the price down by achieving unprecedented economies of scale for a start-up manufacturer, and in April, he told Reuters he expected to have orders for 2.5 million laptops by May, with production targeted to begin in September.

But that has not panned out. So far the foundation has disclosed orders to three countries - Uruguay, Peru and Mongolia. It has not said how many machines they have ordered.

Wayan Vota, an expert on using technology to promote economic development who publishes olpcnews.com, a blog that monitors the group's activities, estimates orders at no more than 200,000 laptops.

"One-hundred dollars was never a realistic price. By starting with an unrealistic price, he reduced his credibility selling the laptop," Vota said.

The laptop features a keyboard that switches languages, a video camera, wireless connectivity and Linux software. The display switches from color to black-and-white for viewing in direct sunlight - a breakthrough that the foundation is patenting and may license next year for commercial use.

The laptop needs just 2 watts of power compared with a typical laptop's 30 to 40 watts and does away with hard drives. It uses flash memory and four USB ports to add memory and other devices.------------

Thursday, November 01, 2007

WD today rolled out its latest 2.5" drive, a 320GB monster ready for connecting to a 3Gbps SATA port.

The Scorpio 320 is 9.5mm high (will fit a MacBook Pro). It has 8MB of cache and a maximum spin speed of 5400rpm, although WD's Intelliseek technology will slow it down if it can do so without reducing the data throughput, to keep the unit's power consumption and noise levels down.

The WD3200BEVS is available now, WD said, from its online store and soon through its reseller channel for $200 (£97).------------

Why run MaC OS on a PC? Well, when you are just used to Windows, it is like living inside a house and not experimenting the whole world out there. Once you get out of it, it is just amazing. Mac is just that: You just feel like glued to the computer. Everything is just beautiful, the interface, the stability. Once you experiment it, you don't want to go back to windows. Trust me.

And one of the things that really got me involved with all this was the ability to have a system that benchmarks [better than] the Mac Pros. You can build your system for a lot less than a real Mac and get the performance of a top-dollar Apple machine.

This is fact and a lot of the real Mac users will deny, but it is fact. My machine runs a e4300 Core Duo Processor over-clocked to 3.40 GHZ. Where can you get a 3.4-GHz MAC? It will cost you a fortune. I have 1066-MHz DDR2 memory, Where can you get that on a Mac???------------